My initial understandings of inquiry compared to now have drastically changed. I first thought that inquiry basically just meant it is a free for all for students to learn about whatever they want, almost like a Genius hour project. As Scott, Smith, Chu, and Friesen (2018) note, the public has a negative perception of inquiry, and I definitely was one of those people who had this perception. Throughout this course, I have adapted that understanding to more of the teacher providing questions for students to come to answers and solutions on their own, and eventually for students to learn how to formulate their own questions about the world we live in and seek answers. Rather than it being a free for all, the teacher guides students through a particular topic and rather than a “stand and teach” method, students seek and develop their own answers to complex problems.
There were a few successes and challenges as a I created this project regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. First off, being interested in the topic and being very exposed to it at this time made it easier to find resources and activities for students to do. There are many connections that can be made to the Black Lives Matter movement, such as the history of slavery as well as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Government of Canada, 2020) from 1982, all the way up to events happening today. The importance of the movement and the vast amount of resources helped make this project planning successful for me. This also leads into one of the challenges that I came across. With the huge amount of resources, opinions, and studies on the topic, it was sometimes difficult to choose ones that I thought would be age-appropriate and still helpful for the lessons. At first, I did not believe that I was going to be able to create a whole year worth of content, but alas, here we are! Another challenge with this was wrapping my head around the assessment portion, which I still have not fully grasped. As Bailey (n.d.) discusses, the whole concept of inquiry does not line up with current assessment practices in Alberta. This is challenging for me, as I have been ‘trained’ to believe that assessment must be demonstrated in some form on paper, but with this project, that will not always be the case. Galileo Education Network (2015) also discusses the four types of assessment present in inquiry – self, peer, community, and teacher – so I have tried to incorporate these into my year plan to provide variety in assessment as well as help students to see the reach of their work. Another challenge for me was the idea of time. I always feel so stressed for time in my work of teaching, but as Galileo Education Network (2015) discusses, an inquiry project is not something that is piled on top of the ‘regular’ work in a classroom, it must become the ‘regular’ work instead. It was challenging for me to wrap my head around that I will have to give up some other practices that have been engrained in me throughout my school days as well as my teacher education in order to fully implement this project, but I am excited to try it out.
At the start of the project, and still now, I have questions about the inquiry process, but am also now able to answer some of my own questions. One question I still have about the process is actually how much ‘freedom’ to give students with the project. This relates to my initial beliefs about inquiry being a ‘free for all’. I think that we need to find a good balance between teacher guidance and student freedom, which can be difficult to achieve and until you know the students, it is a tough choice to make. An initial question I had was “how often do I provide direct lessons/instruction for students?”. Through this course, I have realized that although this is an inquiry project, it is okay to provide students with direct lessons sometimes, but I tried to leave them more open-ended where it is not like a one correct answer but can be up for discussion as everyone has their own beliefs. Another question I had was “would doing novel studies as part of the project still be considered inquiry?” I do believe that having students do an independent novel study where they get to choose a book relating to black history and rights would still be inquiry. This would provide more student choice which is more inquiry-oriented than the whole class reading the same book. Although I was not able to fit this in to my year plan, I could still implement a novel study reading black rights.
In my initial hopes, I was wanting to create an inquiry project about Math, but I found that this was going to be too difficult for my first actual inquiry project planning, so I decided to stick with something I knew would be more successful. In the future, I do hope to apply what I have learned and be able to create a solid inquiry plan for Math as well. I am excited to implement this Black Lives Matter year plan into my classroom (hopefully) next school year and look forward to the possibilities of inquiry!
References:
Bailey, D. (n.d). Bridging the gap: Aligning classroom assessment with inquiry-based learning experiences.
Galileo Education Network. (2015). Focus on inquiry. Retrieved from https://inquiry.galileo.org/
Government of Canada. (2020). Constitution act, 1982. Retrieved from https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-15.html
Scott, D., Smith, C., Chu, M., and Friesen, S. (2018). Examining the efficacy of inquiry-based approaches to education. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 64.1, 35-54